Official LusoVPS Blog

What Is NVMe?

NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) is the new improved SSD technology. Instead of using old SATA connections (Serial-ATA), these Hard Drives are directly connected to the system by PCIe. This means more bandwidth and lower latency.

Background of SSD and NVMe

In the old days, SSD hard drives used SATA or SAS to interface with every machine. But the technology continued to evolve and the 6Gbps SATA limit, now isn’t enough, PCIe was started being used to interface SSD’s. Now, this means that the manufacturers started to develop their own interfaces and this technology started to diverge.

Eventually, SSD manufactureres decided to develop an interface that whas standard across all the operating systems, so that they’ll only need 1 driver. You may think that NVMe interface is the USB standard for SSD Hard Drives.

Why is NVMe interface needed for SSDs?

As previously stated, the SSD technology has evolved in such way that the 6Gbps limit on the SATA wasn’t enough, By using the PCIe SSDs have a much higher bandwidth and lower latency, providing a better experience and usability.

Thanks to this, the SSDs now can handle much bigger data blocks with higher efficiency. This also means that the I/O wait on the servers are drastically lowered, since NVMe drives can outperform the SAS/SATA SSD drives by 6 times.

Comparison Between Ordinary SSDs & NVME SSDs

NVMe drives directly communicate with the CPU via PCI-express lines instead of SATA bus, and they can deliver the significant performance gain. Have a look on following SSD/NVMe disk performance comparison conducted by OVH on 480 GB SSD SATA disk and 480GB NVMe drive.

480GB SSD SATA

480GB NVMe SSD

Sequential Read (128KB)

Up to 500 MB/s

Up to 1000 MB/s

Sequential Write (128KB)

Up to 440 MB/s

Up to 500 MB/s

Random IOPS Read (4KB)

Up to 68,000 IOPS

Up to 240,000 IOPS

Random IOPS Write (4KB)

Up to 15,100 IOPS

Up to 16,000 IOPS

Now, we have launched these NVMe VPS on KVM Hypervisors in Canada and it comes with different flavors, ranging from memory to CPU or HDD:

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but right now, we only use SSL HTML5 VNC Client and Java on VNC connections to the VPSs (previously we only had HTML5). This is valid for the Client area aswell as the management page.

We’re are happy to tell you that we’ve managed to find a suitable provider and implement the solution on WHMCS.

To pay with credit card, just open your invoice on your client area, and select Credit Card (Stripe). You will need to enter your credit card information on our website, but do not worry about safety, since we do not save any credit card information ourselves (it will be saved only the last 4 digits and a Credit Card Token provided by Stripe).

Credit card payments are immediately validated, meaning that there won’t be any human interaction on this transaction.

Edit [02-05-2016]: due to an issue with HiPay, we cannot accept credit card payments anymore.

Edit [27 06 2016]: We are now accepting credit card payments through Stripe.